


wouldn't it be nice?

by lutzaussi



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Genderqueer Ino, Medical Professionals, Tooth-Rotting Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-15
Updated: 2017-03-15
Packaged: 2018-09-30 08:25:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10158677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lutzaussi/pseuds/lutzaussi
Summary: Sakura maybe needs more sleep than she gets on any average night, but when the kindergarten teacher who works at the school across the street is a literal ray of sunshine, it's okay. And when his dad likes her? Even better.





	

Sakura blew some stray hairs out of her face, lobbed the dirty clothes and sheets wadded between her hands into the hamper next to the washing machine. She’d been putting off her laundry, too busy between work and studying to find time over the weekend to do the chore.

So, there she was, Monday morning after classes had restarted for the new year, up to her neck in dirty dishes and clothes. She had no one to blame but herself, living alone, but she still bemoaned her class and work as she cleaned, texting on and off with Ino. Ino was stuck in the library doing homework with a bad hangover. Sakura didn’t feel too bad.

She did feel bad about the hangover thing, if only because she was the one who inspired it, but it wasn’t her fault that her only class was on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Okay—not really, Ino was a grown-ass human who could make adult decisions if need be.

Not that Ino ever made adult decisions.

The chores were all finished, her house verging on sparkling, before the clock on her fireplace mantel even chimed ten. Sakura saw the time and groaned. She didn’t have work, and she wouldn’t be able to take a nap because the children at the school right across from the house she was renting were screeching like the literal hell-beasts they were.

But! But. If there were kids out, it meant that the teachers were also out. She’d been chronicling the drama that was the relationship between the silver-haired gym teacher (she assumed gym; Ino called him the Sil _vah_ Fox) and the third grade teacher (either that or fourth graders, children were confusing; Ino called _him_ the Black Bear but with Brown Hair. Sakura knew his name was Iruka but she found the nickname adorable). It was mostly made-up drama because Sil _vah_ Fox and Black Bear (but with Brown Hair) were disgustingly wholesome, but Sakura didn’t have many other hobbies. Swimming and quilting took up only _so much_ time.

There was also the kindergarten teacher, who Sakura knew because he and his kids were out in the afternoons sometimes when she made a mad rampage down the street to pick up her mail from the community boxes. Grotty slippers and oversized coat and all, and yet he still always said hello and talked to her if she could manage to hold up a conversation.

The thing was he was fucking _cute_ , and while Sakura hadn’t dated since high school (and that was Ino, they’d thankfully gotten over that and remained best friends) and wasn’t looking to be in a relationship, he was sort of….#goals. If she was fully honest. And probably only then when she was drunk and Ino was dragging the truth out of her. His name was Naruto, and apparently Iruka was his dad, his hair was the prefect shade of sun-bleached blond, he did karate (and, whoooaaa boy you could _tell_. Muscles in all the right places), and his smile was like the fucking sun and—

Yeah, Sakura figured she was in pretty goddamned deep.

-

Sakura had ER rounds for only two more weeks and it was with some amount of trepidation that she went in to work on Tuesday. The number of drunks and people injured from drinking was much decreased during the week, but people always found idiotic ways to hurt themselves even when sober.

Tuesday was the usual, though, workplace accidents, over-zealous parents who were convinced their children were dying, two strokes, and other various and sundry. She was suitably exhausted by the time she made it home, and then she had to turn around, go get her mail, and get groceries.

She was very much ready to pass out by the time she was groping the avocados to find some that weren’t yet ripe, and her soul nearly left her body when an overly cheery voice called out from across the produce bins, “Hey, Sakura!”

The avocados may or may not have departed back into the bin with more force than she was intending, and she looked up to find Naruto’s tanned, sunshine-bright face smiling at her from over the potatoes.

“Hey, Naruto!” she returned, trying to kick her brain from autopilot to actual working thought while simultaneously not saying something stupid. She didn’t have to worry though, because Naruto spoke again.

“You look about as tired as I feel,” he said wryly, inspecting potatoes before he bagged them.

“Long day?”

“About as long as kindergarteners can make a day. Back to work?”

Sakura sighed, chose some avocados and moved on, nodding. It had been pretty blatantly obvious that she had been on vacation. “Emergency room rotation. It’s…fun.”

“At least it’s not overnights,” Naruto returned. During her two months of overnights she’d slept all day, only waking up when it was time to get the mail. There were a lot of conversations that they had that she couldn’t really remember.

“That is very true. Ah, fuck, do they not have any more salmon?” Over the course of their conversation they’d moved to the meats, and either Sakura was so tired she was hallucinating that there was no more salmon or they really were out.

Naruto scrutinized the case of frozen fish, “Nah, but they have…eel? Eugh.”

“Ohh, eel,” Sakura elbowed him out of the way to grab a package of that, giggling a little at the rampant, mock-disgust on his face as he searched for some mackerel.

They finished shopping together, which was a relief because Sakura couldn’t really read some of the packages and she didn’t have her glasses, and Naruto didn’t actually know the difference between the sauces he was getting. Naruto even helped her get all of her shopping bags (reusable and heavy) to her car, because he didn’t have as much as her.

“Thanks,” Sakura said, when all of her groceries were tucked away in the back seat of her car, and Naruto was standing maybe a little bit closer than he needed to. She really, really didn’t mind.

“No problem, it was an adventure! Though, eel…” he shook his head, smiled at her, “I’ll see you again?”

“That’s a promise,” Sakura said.

-

Somehow—probably because Sakura was a sucker and liked children even though they were stupidly loud in the morning and not at all because of Naruto’s big baby blues—she agreed to visit the school when he asked her to come in during their career week. It was more going to classrooms and explaining what she did as a nurse than a proper career week, very low energy.

At least, until she got down to the third grade, which was absolute chaos. Iruka did a really good job of keeping some semblance of control, and after she had finished he escorted her out of the room while his assistant teacher got workbooks out.

“I’m so sorry about that,” he said, looking sheepish as he rubbed the back of his head with one hand.

“It’s no problem!” Sakura returned, letting a smile slide onto her face and effectively cutting off any other apologies the other man was going to say, “They were probably excited because of all the visitors this week, if excitement is what you call that.”

Iruka chuckled at that, “I can see why Naruto likes you. Do you need any help getting to the second-grade classroom?”

“I should be fine,” she said, and waited until he was back in his classroom before clutching her chest. Naruto _liked_ her?

-

Sakura was re-organizing her entire collection of books, reference and otherwise, when the doorbell rang twice in quick succession. She stood, groaning as her knees popped and she shuffled to the hallway.

Naruto was standing on the stoop, his left arm covered with blood.

“What the fuck,” Sakura screeched, even as she left the door open and ran to get her over-stocked first aid kit. “Kitchen! Go to the kitchen!”

He was there, sitting obediently as she got a cake pan and set his arm in it, pulling faces at the wood sticking out of it as she washed her hands and sterilized a set of tweezers.

“Fuck!” the blond growled as she went in with the tweezers and began pulling out the remaining splinters.

“Naruto,” Sakura kept her tone warning, steadying his arm with her right hand while she worked with her left. He made the smallest of whining sounds at that, sighed. “How the hell did you do this?”

He waited until she had pulled out a particularly jagged piece, exhaled, and said, “Bookshelf in one of the classrooms wasn’t properly mounted on the wall. It fell, I caught it.” And he probably would have shrugged if she hadn’t been holding him.

“Jesus, next time try not to have it break when you do so,” she said, letting the tweezers clatter into the pan with the splinters as she grabbed gauze and disinfectant. “You don’t need stitches, but I do have to clean it—this might hurt.”

The wounds were not particularly deep or large, but they were still pretty substantial, and Sakura worked carefully to make sure that there were no wood specks left. Once she was sure that they were clean, she wrapped them in a thick gauze pad, secured it with a bandage.

“There, you’re done,” she patted the bandages gently, “is the school nurse not in every day of the week?”

Naruto shook his head, rolled his sleeves back down. They were thankfully not messed up by the splinters or the blood. “She’s the only school nurse in the district,” Naruto explained, standing up and gingerly stretching his arms, “they haven’t had any luck hiring more. Plus, no classes today. We were just cleaning.”

“Huh. Pays like shit, that’s why,” Sakura said, piling all of the first aid stuff back in the kit, wiping stray liquids off the table.

Naruto made a noncommittal noise. “Thank you,” he said, and when Sakura looked across the table at him he had a small, crooked smile on his face, “Now, honestly, you have to let me take you out for coffee or something, I feel bad about bleeding on your table and taking up your afternoon.”

Sakura really, sincerely hoped he couldn’t see how red her ears were when she replied, “I’m not going to say no to an offer like that.”

-

They traded numbers after they had spent three hours in one of the coffee shops near Sakura’s house, talking about their respective pasts, their jobs, Iruka (and Sil _vah_ Fox, who, upon Sakura leaving Naruto, she texted Ino about, but only to tell her that the two men were _not_ in a relationship yet, but Naruto sincerely wished they would stop tip-toeing around), and school.

Sakura was surprised to find that Naruto was still in school, finishing up additional courses so he could get accredited to teach secondary school. “Back-up,” he told her while they were ordering, “if I have to move away it’ll be easier to get a job.”

He was just so easy to talk to, and so altruistically nice that Sakura felt like she was floating when she was on the bus home, and even Ino sending her the most nihilistic comments about the library via both snapchat and facebook did nothing to send her back down.

The books still needed to be finished, and she needed to really clean her kitchen after that afternoon, but Sakura found herself setting the electric kettle to boil and pulling the pint of dark chocolate ice cream out of the freezer. She felt like she was in a daze and at any minute Naruto would text her and break her out of it by telling her he never wanted to see her again.

The text came but, if anything, it made her bubble of happiness even more sparkly, because Naruto had texted _we should get coffee again—still feel like I haven’t made it up to u_.

-

“Your wrist?” Sakura asked, and she really didn’t want it to sound like a whine but her day had already been very long, and she had hoped that the last hour of her shift would be calm.

“No, Konohamaru’s wrist, he’s over by the snake plant trying not to barf,” Naruto said, leaning back and pointing, “he tripped up the stairs, and he was in two days ago because he had the ‘flu—thought he was over it, though.” Sakura and Annemarie peeked over the desk, saw the small brown-haired boy sitting next to the snake plant, hunched over. “His parents are on their way, they wanted me to get him over here.”

“Well. Here’s a barf bag,” Annemarie said, pulling one of the blue bags out from the drawer they were kept in, handed it to Naruto as she continued, “We’ll get him back in a couple minutes, Doctor Carter is still here.”

Sakura got scrubbed back up and got Konohamaru (what the _fuck_ sort of name was that, anyway?) back to her exam room. Thankfully the x-ray tech was still there, and Doctor Carter was almost done with her patient.

That was how Sakura ended up staying an extra half hour, helping Doctor Carter get a cast on the kid’s wrist before injecting him with some promethegan. His parents had arrived before she’d brought him back, but Naruto had hung around until they came back out, Konohamaru passed out on his father’s shoulder.

Naruto walked her out to her car, once she had her purse and her oversized coat on, and they stood shooting the shit for another quarter hour, despite the snow and all.

“I’m sorry for keeping you so long,” Sakura finally said when their conversation wound down.

“Yeah, well, sorry for dragging in a kid when you were supposed to get off,” Naruto returned, rubbing the back of his head with one hand.

“Babysitting?” Sakura asked, and Naruto nodded.

“Well, more a favor for his parents, and my dad. Lord knows why they bought him a bunk bed, but I have a feeling they’re gonna dismantle it.”

“I hope they do,” Sakura said, with feeling. “Hey, you want to get coffee?”

-

Sakura lost track of time as she swam laps, concentrated on making her movements efficient and her mind clear in the cool water of the gym’s pool. The last three hours of the pool’s operating hours were always dead, and always the only time she ever swam.

She did pull herself out, though, because she was getting very tired, and Ino had promised to buy her Indian food if she helped them study anatomy and physiology.

She yawned her way through the showers and pulling her clothes on, managed to get everything back in her duffel before she slogged through the snow to her car. It looked to have snowed the entire time she was in the water, and thankfully she’d stowed an ice scraper in her bag, because her car was a block of ice and snow.

It took half an hour before her car was warmed up and ice-free, during which she called Ino to schedule the Indian food, sent four snapchats to Naruto detailing how freezing her hands were but how pretty campus was, and nearly broke her scraper trying to break through the half-inch layer of ice on the windshield. When she made it home (driving at a rather conservative 20 miles an hour) she was warmed enough that stepping back outside chilled her to the bone.

The apartment was marginally warmer, and she turned on the baseboards with a shiver. Ino was bringing food in an hour, but Sakura was hungry and thirsty and didn’t want to wait. She started the electric kettle to make some tea, and broke into the saltines.

No homework—and if she did have any, anyway, she had a full six goddamn days to get it done.

She checked her phone again, to see if Ino had texted her, but she only found a picture from Naruto—the pine tree in front of his apartment, bedecked with yellow-white lights and snow, with the caption ‘not as pretty as you’. She had no idea how she was going to make it through their regularly scheduled Monday-morning coffee date the next week.

-

Spring break came at last, and though Sakura still had hours at the clinic and main hospital, she was free of all school duties and actually had a few days off work. To do what, she didn’t know. Ino had work though, research work at the university that wasn’t going away just because a school break had come.

“Sakura,” they whined Sunday evening when both of them were sacked out on Sakura’s couch, watching Ghost Adventures and braiding each other’s hair, “why the hell did I decide to go into psychiatry? Why?”

“Because you are a self-applied sadist and masochist,” Sakura automatically replied, tying off Ino’s last braid and picking her phone up from where it had been buzzing under her thighs.

“Nn, turn around,” Ino said, in the most pathetic voice ever. Sakura obliged, swiped her phone to find two texts from her mom, both about how much fun she was having in Hawaii, and no less than twenty snapchats from Naruto. Despite Ino blatantly staring from over her head, Sakura tapped and let a montage of Naruto, Iruka and (Sakura and Ino fist-bumped) Kakashi, aka Sil _vah_ Fox. The last two pics were incoherently blurry.

“What the fuck is that supposed to be?” Ino asked, running their hands through Sakura’s hair. She needed to get it cut.

“I don’t—oh wait, he texted me,” she swiped into her messages and nearly screamed when she saw what Naruto had written. Well, yeah, she did scream.

“The fuck, Sakura?” Ino rubbed their ears, leaned over when Sakura beckoned them through her wheezing.

“Kakashi…confess—HOLY MOTHER,” Ino shrieked as well. “They weren’t dating before?”

“I’m ninety percent sure Naruto threatened him to confess,” Sakura said, still wheezing and clutching her ribs with the hand that wasn’t holding her phone. “Holy shit, our lives have peaked.”

But Ino didn’t answer, still laughing near-hysterically, and Sakura took the moment to take a selfie of them and send it to Naruto, captioned, ‘ino’s been waiting for months for this to happen i think u killed them’.

After ten minutes they were back under control, and Ino eyed Sakura’s hair somewhat critically. “Two braids? One?”

“Two!” Sakura said, letting Ino reposition her for optimum braiding capabilities. They had started with the left side of her head when Sakura said, “Wait, no,” she tipped her head back to look Ino in the eye, smiling somewhat devilishly, “you can help me dye my roots, first!”

-

Wednesday of spring break Sakura received an invitation from Naruto on Iruka’s behalf, and Naruto himself appeared at Sakura’s house at six on Friday in his soccer-mom minivan (inherited from Iruka, he said solemnly when she eyed some of the marker stains on the back seats). Her stomach felt fluttery as they drove to Iruka’s house, making general small talk until they were inside the house.

Naruto toed his shoes off and hung his coat on the coat stand, moving quickly so Sakura could do the same.

“Word of warning,” Sakura said, holding up and wiggling her pager as she took her shoes off and put them neatly by the front door, “I am on call, hopefully they won’t need me.”

“Tonight?” Naruto asked, taking her coat and hanging it on the stand, and hurrying to help Sakura stand back up.

“Oof, yeah, until midnight,” she stretched her back, and looked at him, worried, “I hope that’s okay. They aren’t supposed to call unless they get an overload of patients.”

“Nah, it’s fine,” Naruto waved a hand, not letting go of one of hers as they went into the house proper. It was airy despite how small it was, simple and lived-in, “Ah, I think we got here before dad.”

Sakura wandered into the living room, her eye already caught by a row of pictures on the mantel of the fireplace, while Naruto stopped in the kitchen to check the crockpot and the rice cooker.

There were a lot of them; the pictures. Many of them were of Iruka and Naruto, Iruka’s past classes, Naruto’s graduations. She got a little misty-eyed when she found the earliest one of Naruto, probably all of five years old with a bandage on one of his knees, holding out a bunch of crumpled papers while Iruka beamed behind him.

“That’s the day the adoption papers went through,” Naruto said, sounding a little shy when he walked into the room, hands stuffed in his pockets.

“How old were you?” she asked, hoping that she wasn’t overstepping.

“Almost four,” Naruto said, a fond smile on his face when he picked up the frame in question. He placed the frame back, pointed out a couple other photos and explained the history behind them before the front door opened.

“Naruto?” Iruka’s voice filtered back to them, and Naruto called back, “Living room.”

-

Dinner at Iruka’s house was the best thing that Sakura had agreed to in months. Years, even, all the more reason it was a literal tragedy when her time there was cut short by her pager going off.

“Son of a _bitch_ ,” she said before she could turn her brain filter on, grabbing the pager and standing from the very comfortable couch she and Naruto had been sitting on, giggling at Iruka’s stories.

Iruka looked understanding as he stood, “Duty calls?”

“Yep,” Sakura sighed, following Naruto back to the entrance hall and pulling on her shoes as he got their coats. “Thank you so much for having me over, I had a wonderful time.”

“Hopefully you’ll be able to come over again,” Iruka said, smiling fondly at both of them as Sakura slipped her coat on and Naruto got his shoes on.

Naruto drove Sakura back to her house, a relatively quick drive, and before she got out of the car she paused. “Thanks for inviting me,” she said to Naruto, suddenly feeling immensely shy.

“Sakura,” he said, suddenly very serious and focused, “may I kiss you?”

Sakura felt her eyes go wide and she said, breathless, “Yes,” before he leaned forward and did just that.

-

She made it back at roughly seven in the morning, feet hurting, arms hurting, back hurting, but unable to stop grinning like an absolute fool. Her house was dark and cold in the morning light, and she was exhausted, but she set about opening most of the blinds, started water for tea and a pan on the stove for eggs. Exhaustion was easy to work through when high off of life.

The shortest shower she had ever taken took place before she ate and when she was done with that she went to her own living room, full to the brim with books, and settled on the couch with her pot of tea and her very dog-eared anatomy textbook. Light reading, would get her relaxed to go to bed, and she was in the middle of the muscles of the leg when she began to do just that.

She was interrupted from the dark tide of sleep slowly cresting over her by her phone buzzing at her. Sakura slid her textbook off her legs and onto the coffee table, fumbled the offending item off the table so she could swipe it on.

Two texts—rapid fire.  First, _just fyi my dad loves you and he wants you to come over for dinner again_. Then: _is it too early for me to say that i love you too?_

Sakura covered her mouth, had to take a moment to breathe deeply before she typed back, _only if it’s not too early for me to say i love u_.


End file.
